This is the land of cheap layovers on the way to Romania. Thanks to the
invisible hand of the market, tickets to the airports that are close to where my
fiancee lives were 50% cheaper when flying through Istanbul, with an overnight
layover, than more direct flights. It was still cheaper when buying two nights
in a hotel. So through Istanbul it was. I figured it might be my last trip
alone, so it should be fun.

And it was. Istanbul is a very colorful and diverse city. You see all kinds of
people getting along. And they have something us in the "west" don't have: time.
Everywhere …continue.

It's that time of the year again when the Easter Bunny I visit
Romania. History likes to
repeat itself, but there are
changes.

First change, which I welcome with open arms (and mouth), is that they have
good orange juice in Romania. The packaging claims it's all natural, fresh, only
pas­teur­ized. And it actually tastes quite similar to the one I buy in
Switzer­land. \:D/

Second change is that they recently (in the last month) passed a law banning
smoking in all public closed spaces. This means that you can go into a
restaurant or coffee shop and enjoy your meal without coming out reeking of
smoke. It's awesome. …continue.

A month ago there was the first ever SRECon in Europe. It got together lots of
SRE-like engineers (basically the people who are re­spon­si­ble for the software
that is live, running in production) from Google (the host of the event),
Facebook, Etsy, Splunk, SoundCloud and others. Because I'm an SRE, I had the
op­por­tu­ni­ty to go there. With this occasion, I stayed two more days to have the
chance to see Ireland and Dublin a bit more (yes, I know I'm terribly late with
this post).

I was oncall the week that ended in the long weekend of the 1st of May. It was a
rainy weekend and I had to stay inside the house, during my shift, but because
it was rainy, it wasn't very tempting to go outside even after it. So I decided
I would take an extended weekend to relax after my shift and to get away from
computers. I've always liked British culture and I also have several friends in
London, some of which I haven't seen in ages, so I decided to go there.

The first thing that shocked me about British "culture": red lights for
pedes­tri­ans …continue.

On my second day in Geneva, after waking up quite late, Cipri, Alexandra and I
went to the Geneva In­ter­na­tion­al Inventions Exhibition.

It is quite large exhibition, having 790 inventions, from 45 countries,
displayed on 8900 m^2 surface. It wasn't entirely what I expected. It reminded
me of Infomatrix, the in­ter­na­tion­al­i­ty of par­tic­i­pants (even more so here), all
the people standing at their booths "selling" their invention, Budisteanu (a guy
from Romania who was both at Infomatrix and here), and the huge variation in the
quality of projects: some super awesome ones, that make you go wow, to some...
that don't seem new, original, well-developed, and in some …continue.

During the Catholic Easter holidays, I went to Romania for a one week visit.
Initially the plan was that my parents would come and visit me, but I had more
days off, so I ended up coming to my homeland.

After having been in Switzer­land for 7 months now, I started to notice several
things, some of which were a bit saddening. They suggest that some of the
problems in Romania are deeply ingrained in our culture and at least based on
the small sample of people contained in my friend bubble, it won't change
anytime soon.